


Mud Nostalgia: A Modern Borgia Siblings Episode

by CreziasAlias



Series: Modern Nostalgia: A Borgia Siblings Tale [1]
Category: The Borgias (Showtime TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Borgiacest, Consensual, Drama, F/M, Forbidden Love, Historical References, Moral Ambiguity, Romance, Sexual Content, Sibling Incest, Siblings, borgias au
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-09
Updated: 2021-01-09
Packaged: 2021-03-18 02:35:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 6,924
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28610688
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CreziasAlias/pseuds/CreziasAlias
Summary: [Modern day/AU] Lucrezia is engaged to the sweet Alfonso, who starts taking issue with Cesare's possessive behaviour towards his sister. Lucrezia doesn't seem aware of this, nor is she aware of her own fixation on her brother's romantic life. In this short story, Cesare takes Lucrezia to a football game and they start attracting the attention of the crowds for all the wrong reasons.Nostalgie de la Boue*Working on part two, which is sort of a follow-up but can be read separately
Relationships: Cesare Borgia & Lucrezia Borgia, Cesare Borgia/Lucrezia Borgia
Series: Modern Nostalgia: A Borgia Siblings Tale [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2133750
Comments: 3
Kudos: 21





	1. Part I: The Proposal

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Lucrezia tries to study but can't put her mind to it, especially when her brother pays her a surprise visit.

It was just past twelve o’clock when Lucrezia shut her book and went to the kitchen to get some lunch. She’d been studying since seven thirty and still she felt she would never make it.

Not that she was a bad planner – she considered herself the best planner in the family, actually, although neither of her brothers agreed with her – but she’d taken on two bachelors whose timeslots ran more or less parallel to each other, which was simply impractical if not impossible. She had an exam for international governance the next day, a paper due for Early Modern Italian literature at the end of the week, and then the week after there was another exam that could either be for governance or for history. It didn’t help that she could hardly concentrate, or that she’d slept terribly for days now.

She went to the kitchen and peered into the fridge while she gathered her long blonde hair together in a high ponytail. It was dark brown originally, but that just didn’t do a thing for her. Personally, that is. The idea of looking like an archetype dumb blonde while she really wasn’t appealed to Lucrezia. She’d told that to Cesare once, who’d laughed and said that the Italians have an idiom for it: _fare la gatta morta,_ or “acting like a dead cat”. Not too flattering, perhaps, but at least one could expect the dead cat to be blonde.

The fridge was filled to the brim, but nothing looked very desirable. Lucrezia almost decided to take something out randomly, when a voice spoke from behind the open fridge door: ‘Good morning, sis.’

She didn’t close the door to expose the person there, because she’d rather look at the food she didn’t want to eat.

‘How’s your paper coming?’ Her oldest brother asked.

She didn’t answer. She might have, if she could have told him that it was coming along just fine – except she didn’t even have a topic yet, and he’d hear right away if she lied.

‘You have a topic yet?’ He asked.

She resisted the urge to grunt and give herself away. ‘What are you doing here? You don’t live here anymore,’ she snapped at him. She was still looking into the fridge, but it might as well have been completely empty for all that registered with her.

‘I’m taking you out,’ Cesare answered. ‘You know, in the _fun_ way, not the assassin way. In case that needed specifying.’

Their father Rodrigo worked for the deputy director of the Directorate of Operations, that is, the Clandestine Service of the CIA – the one that collects foreign intelligence and plans covert actions. Explosions and state secrets and things like that. Rodrigo’s specific job title was long and intricate and, so his children suspected, prone to change while the actual job requirements did not – but most of what he did consisted of overseeing regional CIA divisions, the most notable of which was the Vatican. When they were young, Rodrigo’s children spent a couple of years calling their father a spy, despite his argument that he at least had to see the Pope once in a while in order to spy on him. Still, he frequently met with men in red or purple frocks, so that when the children got older and of an ange to understand why some men wore fancy dresses, they took to calling Rodrigo “the Pope”. He liked that better than spy, though he never admitted it.

‘Well, it didn’t,’ Lucrezia said, still talking to radishes and juice boxes. ‘And I can’t.’

Cesare snorted from behind the fridge door. ‘Why, you have more moping to do? Staring soulfully out of the window, thinking about the meaning of life and the essence of all things crude…’

‘As a matter of fact-’ She started.

‘Boring,’ he interrupted. ‘You’re coming with me.’

‘I was going to say: as a matter of fact, I can’t because I really don’t want to.’

‘Come on, don’t be sour to your favourite brother. Be sour to Juan.’

Juan was the second-oldest brother and a distinctly unlikeable person, although both their father and Juan himself would likely die without ever knowing it.

‘I’m not being anything. I just don’t care to go out,’ Lucrezia said.

Cesare sighed and leaned against the fridge door, causing it to slam shut. It revealed a lean, dark-haired man with hazel eyes that sparkled as they scrutinized the world, and noticed everything that it lacked and that it was to blame for.

Lucrezia said ‘hey!’ when the view of radishes and juice boxes was replaced by that of Cesare, but he ignored her. ‘Then we’ll stay in,’ he said tiredly, as if he were already stretching himself impossibly thin.

‘To go out with _you_. I don’t like you,’ Lucrezia lied.

She left the fridge and her domineering brother and rummaged around in the kitchen cabinets to find herself a wine glass. She wasn’t a day drinker or anything, but it was a family habit to drink water out of wine glasses. They drank everything else out of champagne or whiskey glasses.

As Lucrezia filled her glass with water, she chided herself for not concentrating better and going down for lunch instead. Though Cesare probably would have bothered his sister no matter where she was; he would follow her to goddamn Jupiter, truly.

When she turned back from the sink, Cesare was leaning against the kitchen island, looking at her.

‘You don’t like what I did, that’s different,’ he said. ‘Which is why, today, I’m going to do something that you _will_ like.’

‘Like leaving me alone?’ Lucrezia tried.

‘Ha-ha.’

He reached into his back pocket and showed her the two small leaflets he’d kept there.

‘You have tickets to the game!’ She said, a little too excitedly for her taste. She didn’t even care that much for football itself: she liked the experience of being in an arena jam-packed with people that were all so full of passion that you would never entirely believe they were strangers. All the spirit they exuded, the heart and the lust for blood.

Well, something profound, anyway.

‘Yes!’ Cesare replied, mimicking his sister’s pitch. ‘And before you ask: it’s a package deal.’ He wafted the papers around to indicate her and himself.

She grunted, but the truth was that Cesare was an inherent part of the “experience” and thus going to a game was always a package deal. She’d never realized this, nor had she ever considered the fact that she’d never gone to a game without him. Cesare did realize this, but it was part of the game not to bring it up.

‘I’m working,’ Lucrezia said.

‘Yeah, and how’s that going?’

Lucrezia looked away, but it was right on the nose and he knew it.

‘Look,’ he said, tapping the tickets on the surface of the kitchen island. ‘The best way to get over your inability to focus is to distract yourself. You have to give into it, Crezia, otherwise it will always lurk on the edge of your consciousness trying to pull you in.’ He made a scary face and growled at his sister, who regarded him sceptically.

‘What?’ She said.

‘You need to take control of your life and challenge fortune! This is not a ticket to a football game, it’s a ticket to challenge fortune.’

‘But where _do_ you come up with such a rich fountain of bull?’

‘Niccolò Machiavelli, if you must know, sister. You can’t possibly resist his reasoning.’

‘So I need to go with you because Machiavelli told me to?’

‘In effect.’

Lucrezia rolled her eyes, although she did love Machiavelli. Then she gave a laborious sigh and said: ‘Well, at least I won’t have to listen to you, since I’ll be too busy watching the game.’

‘That’s the spirit!’ Cesare said. ‘I’ll wait in the car.’

Lucrezia muttered something indelicate and then went to change. Cesare didn’t go to the car immediately: instead, he went over to where his sister had stood and drank the water that she hadn’t touched.


	2. Part II: The Things that Stick

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Cesare and Lucrezia make their way to the football game, and re-open some distant and some less-than-distant wounds. Feeling guilty, Cesare attempts to make up for some of his mistakes and is thwarted in his attempts when they run into Alfonso and Sancía.

‘Look, I’m sorry about last week,’ he said, when he pulled into the parking lot of the arena. They’d spoken very little during the ride; Lucrezia had pretended to be ensconced in an article she had to read for her exam, and Cesare had been busy dreaming up a half-decent apology. It was silly, really, for if he’d asked her what she was reading, she couldn’t have told him, and if she’d asked him what he was thinking about, he wouldn’t have told her.

Lucrezia put the article away and turned to look at her brother. He was manoeuvring the car into a parking spot and couldn’t return the look, which gave her a pleasant feeling of power over him.

‘Really? Why?’ She asked.

But Cesare was rather got at manoeuvring. ‘I didn’t mean to hurt you,’ he said diplomatically.

‘So you’re not sorry that it happened.’

‘Come on, Lucrezia, you’re killing me.’

He parked the car and went around to the other side quick as a flash, so that Lucrezia only managed to open the door by herself. ‘I wish,’ she said, but she accepted his extended hand and got out of the car in the utmost regal manner.

‘Come on, it’s not like I coerced the girl into having fun. Two adults, etcetera,’ Cesare said. He gave her suave smile, but she made a face and pulled her hand away from his.

‘She’s my friend. And Alfonso’s sister,’ she said, as they started towards the stadium. They were early, and Lucrezia wondered if her brother had done that on purpose. She had to admit that he, too, was a decent planner, and a shrewd one at that.

‘Tit for tat, Lucrezia. _You’re_ my sister and _Alfonso’s_ my friend, you don’t hear me complaining about that,’ he said.

One _would_ hear him complaining about that, actually, and with some frequency, but Lucrezia tapped a different vein. ‘You and Alfonso are friends now?’ She asked with obvious incredulity.

‘Of course. I knew him long before you barged in and corrupted our beautiful brotherly bond,’ Cesare answered.

She snorted. ‘Please, you don’t even like him.’

They were at the outmost entrance of the stadium, where they were stopped by a buff guard with a blinking bald head. ‘Not true,’ Cesare told Lucrezia, as he gave their tickets to the man checking them. The man seemed a great deal less interested in those than in Lucrezia, because he looked at her longer and with more interest. Cesare scowled at the man, who quickly returned the tickets and let them through.

‘I used to like him, before he…’ Cesare went on. He looked back at the guard and continued doing so until they had to round a corner. Then he looked straight ahead, seemingly unaware of his sister’s eyes on him. ‘Before he wetted the bed and let me and father mop up his mess,’ he finished.

Cesare worked for Cardinal Rover Catalano now, but he previously worked for archbishop Andrea Ruggiero, who had been the papal nuncio from the Holy See to Washington but was demoted after being implicated in a scandal. Alfonso worked for the ministry of Foreign Relations in Washington, in a suboffice that was largely responsible for this implication. The charge concerned Catalano’s involvement in a post-war operation dubbed Operation Gladio, an international anti-communist covert operation headed by several intelligence agencies and the Vatican. The Operation blew up in the early nineties, so the fact that it should bite the old archbishop in the ass had been a shock – especially for Cesare and his Father, who had several “friends” in the office responsible, Alfonso among them.

It wasn’t Alfonso’s fault, though. Things blow up in politics and the game shifts; unfortunate, but unavoidable. Cesare knew this, but still he blamed Alfonso. 

‘Alfonso was not responsible for that trial and you know it,’ Lucrezia reminded him, but he scoffed as soon as she did. ‘Besides, it’s not as if the allegations were unfounded,’ she added.

‘What the hell does that have to do with anything?’ He erupted. ‘This is the Vatican, in America. Every cardinal, bishop, monsignor or whatever is involved in _some_ plot.’ He shook his head and ran his hand through his hair. He’d let it grow too long so that it came down halfway down to his ears, causing it to tangle more easily. He tried to stick a stray curl behind one ear, but it bounced right back.

‘God,’ he said, annoyed. ‘The least they could have done was uncover a plot that’s still fucking _relevant._ The Gladio thing was a cold case. Why would anyone bother with such ancient history anyway, unless someone pointed the right people in the right direction?’

‘Don’t be an ass,’ Lucrezia said, at least as annoyed as her brother. ‘Alfonso had nothing to do with it. His boss had a vengeance and besides, the only reason Ruggiero wasn’t implicated before is because of the protection the _CIA_ gave him, also with Alfonso’s help. But things like that can only last for so long, especially nowadays. Opening cold cases is a common hobby of politicians and lay people alike.’

‘Right,’ Cesare said. He wasn’t convinced, but he never would be. ‘Well, I guess you’re the expert, aren’t you? How is that paper coming along anyway? Maybe you can write it on the governance of Alfonso’s office, then we’ll know for sure.’

‘I have to write a paper for history, not governance.’

‘Great, then you can write about Operation Gladio. Ancient history, as I said.’

‘Let it go, will you!’ Lucrezia snapped, making her hands into fists. ‘You’re just blaming Alfonso for this because you want to have a reason to hate him, but deep down in that cluttered head of yours you know it’s all bull. Besides, I’m engaged to him now so you have to be nice to him and treat him like a brother and all that.’

Cesare snorted, for if there was something he would never do it was to treat Alfonso as his “brother”. He hardly even treated Juan as a brother, and although Juan had few redeeming qualities, one thing in his favour was that he didn’t put his hands anywhere on Lucrezia.

Cesare noticed Lucrezia’s clenched hands – in fact, she was almost pissed off enough for a dark cloud to have gathered above her head – and remembered that he’d been trying to apologize to her.

‘What, like you’re treating me?’ he said jokingly.

She didn’t really react to that, so he frowned and pondered the best way to phrase his thoughts. For a couple of minutes they walked in silence, with just the background noises of people calling for beer or vendors announcing the price of their hotdogs and the like. They were strolling along the edges of the stadium, and every once in a while they’d pass by a throng of stalls or dixies that seemed to attract noise. The experience was like attending a flea market for construction workers at night.

‘I just…. don’t like the engagement,’ Cesare said, when there was a quieter patch. ‘I don’t like the idea of marriage, first of all, and I also think it’s too soon, whether you love him or not.’

Lucrezia opened her mouth, perhaps to say that she did love him, but he talked over her. ‘But I’m not the kind of brother who takes that out on his little sister… I do want you to be happy, you know.’

He meant it, but she was less than pleased by his overt antagonism towards her fiancé. ‘So you’re taking it out on _him_ instead of me,’ she said angrily.

‘ _Pass_ ively.’

‘That’s not fair, Cesare.’

He stopped and looked at her. There were a bunch of stalls coming up, and there were more people around them, but he didn’t mind them. He rubbed his hands together with some exaggeration and said: ‘Oh, let’s play _that_ game. What else isn’t fair, let’s see…’

‘Okay, I don’t need to hear it,’ Lucrezia said quickly, and she turned around to look ahead. ‘Let’s just go find our seats.’

When they were headed for one of the entrances that led to the field, Cesare stopped again, much to Lucrezia’s irritation. ‘What is it now?’

‘Just stand still, I’ll be right back,’ he said. He was looking at something a little further back, but Lucrezia couldn’t see what or who it was.

‘Everyone’s going to be searching for their seats, Cesare, I don’t want to get stuck in human traffic,’ she said, but he was already making his way through a group of people that had been walking behind them.

‘Yeah, yeah,’ she heard him say, and then he was gone.

She waited for a few minutes, watching dozens of people pass. Some glanced at her, mostly men. Not to give the impression that she was wearing anything indecent or provoking, but one might say she had a certain attraction: she had the same hazel eyes as her brother, but her outlook was inquiring rather than cynical. Her skin was lighter, too, as if complexion matched personality. And then she had these endless curls that girls big and small dream of, all perfectly blonde and in line with the dead cat idiom.

She didn’t really mind standing on the side by herself, looking pretty and swimming in her invisible spotlight. Partly because of that spotlight, she didn’t notice when Cesare reared his dark head again, nor did she notice that the pair of eyes that adored her the most were a copy of hers.

By the time she saw him, he was almost standing in front of her. He was holding a flat bed of what looked like aluminium foil in the palm of his hand, with an unidentifiable mush on top. When he came closer, it became clear that this mush was a large fruit stake with warm chocolate poured over it.

Cesare smiled triumphantly at his sister as he picked off a chocolate raspberry and put it in his mouth.

Lucrezia drew in her breath sharply and sped up to him to loom over the delicacy. When she stuck her hand out, Cesare lifted his arm and wagged his finger in her face.

‘Uh-uh! This is only for people who are nice to me.’ He picked up a piece of pineapple and stuck it in his mouth, only opening his eyes to see the envy on her face. ‘Hmm, _tasty_ ,’ he mused, before picking out another raspberry. He dangled it in front of her face for a while to taunt her.

As he’d expected, she retaliated: she dragged two fingers through the hot chocolate and smeared it across his cheeks and his lips.

He gasped theatrically. ‘What manners you have!’ He cried. ‘I wonder, if I ask you to sit and roll over, will you do it?’ He held out a cherry a little way above her head.

She kept her eyes fixed on the cherry and opened her mouth slightly. He laughed while he lifted the thing up and down. In that moment, she snatched the full plate of fruit straight out of his hand and jumped back. ‘No,’ she said coyly. ‘But I know other tricks.’

‘Dirty tricks!’ He exclaimed.

She gave him a wicked grin and bit off half of a pineapple piece.

‘Dirty tricks and dirty faces,’ Cesare said, watching how juice ran down her chin.

‘Pot kettle,’ she mumbled, because he still hadn’t wiped off the chocolate on his face. She recognized that it was her fault, though, so she ate the rest of the pineapple and then reached out to try and wipe him clean. He patiently held still as she worked on him with one hand and kept the dish in the other. It was lucky that the chocolate on his face had mostly dried, so it crumbled easily.

He let her eat the rest of the fruit after, refusing to take anything more for himself. When she was done he put his thumb against her chin to remove the fruit and chocolate mess. ‘Will you forgive me now?’ He asked. He was grinning and his eyes glowed mischievously, but she could hear from his voice that he was serious.

She regarded him silently as he brushed over the corner of her mouth and then stuck his thumb in his own mouth without thinking twice about.

‘Lucrezia?’ Someone called. A man and a woman had appeared quite suddenly next to them, the man wearing a grin that stretched from ear to ear and the woman wearing a tight-fitting tank-top, mostly.

‘Alfonso!’ Lucrezia exclaimed, and she turned to embrace the man.

Cesare seemed as surprised by this appearance as she was, although he wasn’t all too pleased by it. He gave Alfonso a stiff nod and Sancía a beguiling smile and wink. Then he licked the rest of his fingers clean and took the aluminium plate from Lucrezia to throw it away.

Lucrezia noticed her brother’s greeting and watched him walk over to the nearest trash can. ‘What are you doing here, honey?’ she asked, distracted. She might have noticed that that was a silly question if she hadn’t been.

‘I got off work earlier, so I thought I’d come see the game with my sister,’ Alfonso answered, still smiling. Any fool could notice that he smiled excessively when he was in the vicinity of his wife-to-be.

Cesare rejoined them halfway through the sentence. ‘What a coincidence!’ He said. ‘So did I. Let’s get back to that, shall we? The game’s about to start.’ He tried to take Lucrezia’s hand and pull her away, but Lucrezia shook him off and gave him a dirty look.

‘Why don’t you sit with us? We’ve got a box,’ she said to Alfonso and Sancía. ‘Don’t we, Ces?’

‘An entire box?’ said Sancía. Her mouth opened to form a perfect, practiced ring, and then she puckered her lips the way a pretty but spoiled child would have. Which she was, in effect.

‘Yeah, dad reserved it but he couldn’t make it. I wouldn’t know how he could have with his job, but the man is a terrible planner,’ Lucrezia explained. She didn’t know that Cesare had elected to simply pay for the entire box because he thought that she would prefer it to the crowds. She did, but even if she didn’t he probably would have chosen the box anyway.

‘If it’s fine with you,’ Alfonso said to Cesare.

The latter smiled as passively as he could, because he knew that both Sancía and Lucrezia were watching. Oh, and Alfonso was a _friend,_ lest anyone forget. ‘Of course,’ he said.

‘Great!’ Lucrezia exclaimed. She reached out for Alfonso to walk with him to the entrance, much to Cesare’s chagrin, but Alfonso turned to Cesare – even more to Cesare’s chagrin, and Sancía’s, who pouted again. Lucrezia was unphased, though. She turned her attention to Alfonso’s sister and the two of them led the party into the heart of the stadium. They were chatting busily, with one of them sometimes glancing back to the men that walked silently behind them. It wouldn’t have appeared odd to the onlooker, because in all honesty, one frequently finds such quartets around football stadiums, or any public event.

Alfonso was the chattier of the two, and he attempted some small talk that Cesare engaged in very sparingly. After a couple of failed attempts at a comfortable conversation, Alfonso cleared his throat and said: ‘Look, I don’t want you to take this the wrong way. I’m speaking as a friend, you see.’

‘Of _course_ ,’ Cesare said, silently gloating.

‘As you can imagine, I heard about last week, with that little party Lu had, um…’ The sentence more or less came to a halt with Alfonso’s deep frown and muttered syllables.

Cesare gloated some more because of this. Alfonso was simply the type of man who struggled rebuking people directly. To his credit, he didn’t resort to doing it indirectly, although Cesare might have preferred it had he known where Alfonso was going.

‘I’m just gonna say it,’ Alfonso said, almost breathless. ‘I think you should back off. A little.’ He didn’t give Cesare an unpleasant look or smile, just a very serious, _serious_ face.

Cesare was at once annoyed and amused. ‘I appreciate your concern,’ he said, though he made it clear from his voice that he didn’t. ‘But don’t you think you should let Sancía speak for herself? She’s a big girl, Alfonso. Besides, there’s nothing much to talk about. It was very far from being a party, just some drinks and games. I really don’t see why this is suddenly everybody’s favourite topic.’

Alfonso frowned. ‘I’m not talking about Sancía.’

They stared at each other, both pondering the consequences of a fight. Cesare was thinking about how good it would feel to feel Alfonso’s body jerk on the impact of his fist, while Alfonso thought of how embarrassed he would be if half the stadium was privy to a heated argument between the two of them. And there was Lucrezia, of course, but Cesare was thinking about that too.

‘Then I’m sure I don’t know what you’re getting at,’ Cesare said slowly and in a low, dangerous voice.

Alfonso heard the warning and would have been impressed, if he hadn’t been so outraged that he’d been forced into having this argument. Well, he hadn’t been forced by anyone other than himself, but it just hadn’t been an option _not_ to bring it up, especially after he’d seen Cesare sucking his fingers. That action had made him simultaneously revolting and frightening to Alfonso, and incidentally he felt the same about Cesare’s possessiveness towards Lucrezia. Poor Lucrezia, he kept thinking.

So Alfonso stuck to his guns, saying: ‘I’m sure you do.’

Poor Lucrezia must have become aware of his empathetic pity, because she’d turned around at some point and found that her brother and fiancé had fallen behind. She and Sancía had retraced their steps and were now looking from the one to the other now with matching expressions of suspicion.

‘Something wrong?’ Lucrezia asked, looking at Alfonso and then at Cesare. ‘Ces?’

Cesare forced himself to relax whatever muscles made his upper lip curl up, which became noticeably easier when he looked upon his sister. ‘No, nothing at all,’ he told her. Then he lifted his arm the way a gentleman might have. She took it without knowing how ungentlemanlike this move was, or how indignant her fiancé looked, and let her brother lead her to their box.


	3. Part III: The Game

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Nostalgie de la Boue
> 
> The game starts: Alfonso sees his tough love act blow up in his face, and the siblings court disaster.

Because of the order of entrance, everyone ended up sitting next to his or her sibling: Cesare on the right with Lucrezia on his left, and since Alfonso had entered the box before his sister – possibly on purpose – he sat next to his fiancé, with Sancía closing the row on his other side. Neither Cesare nor Sancía seemed completely happy with this arrangement, and soon began to feel neglected: Alfonso kept bending over to tell Lucrezia something or to touch her cheek or point something out, leaving the other two no one to talk to. It wasn’t really about the talking, of course, but one must not be too forthright about such things.

This situation persisted for some time. Meanwhile, the game below was ruthless, with players on both sides showing little restraint or loss of energy, and with the commentators practically screaming into their microphones. It might have been true that the people in the box caught some of the game’s intensity and that _that_ was the reason things escalated – the game certainly had something to do with it – and yet none of the people in the box were seriously watching it. Everyone got up at the right moments, of course, but it’s harder to _not_ do that than to do it, even in a closed-off box.

It was Sancía who first tried to improve the situation, at least for herself. Cesare, for his part, was trying to win Lucrezia’s attention and shooting Alfonso hateful glances whenever he didn’t succeed. He hadn’t suggested a reseating because the seating wasn’t the problem to him: the amount of people was. Since he’d already passed up his chance of doing something about that, there was nothing he could do. But Sancía had no such barriers, and so she stood up, went to the end of the line of seats and haughtily told everyone to move over so that now the order was Alfonso, Lucrezia, Cesare and herself.

‘Sorry,’ she said, to Cesare in particular. ‘The sibling bonding thing wasn’t working out for me.’

She smiled beguilingly and flicked back her ponytail which had fallen past her shoulders. She probably had the smoothest curtain of hair out of anyone present in the stadium, and she liked to show it even if it was bundled together and obscured partly by a baseball cap. Unlike Lucrezia, she’d committed to the sports outfit, but for entirely vain reasons since she thought she could pull it off better than anyone. She wasn’t completely wrong about that, to be fair.

Cesare returned Sancía’s smile and watched her flick her raven hair with due admiration. ‘I hope the bonding thing is still on, though?’ He said coyly.

Sancía glanced past him at Lucrezia and Alfonso. Alfonso was holding a strand of Lucrezia’s hair, which looked a little odd because Lucrezia didn’t seem to be paying him much attention. ‘Yeah, definitely,’ Sancía said. Then she got out a pack of cigarettes and lit one for herself.

‘You want one?’ She asked Cesare, speaking with the cigarette clenched between her lips.

‘Oh, I’m not much of a smoker,’ Cesare said, and he reached out to take her cigarette and take a draw from it. Sancía didn’t mind this – far from it, she thought it was sexy – but Lucrezia gave her brother a disgusted look that went completely ignored. He took another draw and then he returned the cigarette by tucking it back between Sancía’s lips.

‘You know, I really enjoy games. They bring out the child in me,’ Sancía said, as she pretended to be enraptured by the football game. She even thought to let the cigarette hang casually from her hand, without bringing it to her mouth or tapping the ashes off.

Cesare ignored the game and looked at her profile. It was hard to imagine that anything brought out the child in Sancía. She had a darker complexion like him, with her eyes, eyelashes and eyebrows all as raven black as her silken hair. She also had one of those regal-looking faces, with a proud, curved nose and sculpted cheekbones – so if she ever asked you to do something, most people would do it even when she didn’t look directly at them. She was a little frightening, actually, or so most people would say; but she used her looks to her advantage, as she did now.

‘It’s the opposite for me,’ Cesare said to her. ‘Somehow games turn me into this insufferable adult.’

‘I think they call those kinds of adults _teenagers_ , or maybe young adults. The ones that are too old for Twilight and too young for Fifty Shades,’ Sancía replied, and she shortly turned away from the game she wasn’t really watching to give Cesare a meaningful smile.

‘Oh, I don’t know about that. Depends on the game, maybe,’ Cesare said.

Sancía dropped her burned up cigarette and turned her full attention to him. ‘And what’s your favourite game, Cesare?’

It was a loaded question; indeed, a loaded conversation, because they’d played one particular “young adult” game just the week before – that is, Lucrezia and Sancía had had a girl’s night, and Cesare had interrupted it, sipping a bottle of whiskey and sending his dark looks all over the room. Cesare had sat around, the whiskey had vanished from the bottle and the bottle had ended up in the slender hands of wicked Sancía, who’d spun it around on the ground with the air of an excited schoolgirl.

To give a short account of the drama that inevitably ensued: the bottle first pointed to Lucrezia, who objected but still took Sancía’s kiss in stride. Sancía tried to make Lucrezia spin it next, but Lucrezia refused long enough for Sancía to hand the bottle over to Cesare. The bottle again pointed to Lucrezia, as if it sensed her reluctance and enjoyed the discomfort it caused her. Cesare came down from the bed he’d been occupying to kiss his sister’s cheek, or the corner of her mouth should the whiskey make him unsteady. His lips had only grazed her mouth when Lucrezia jumped up and took Cesare’s position on the bed. Sancía laughed and spun the bottle again. They never knew where it landed on this time, because she put her hand on it and turned it back to Cesare. Cesare sniggered, and like his sister, he took Sancía’s kiss in stride. After that, he took it sitting and lying down, too, to Lucrezia’s sizeable wrath.

On the day of the football game, Sancía was the third person to refer to this event, though she was the first to do so in a light-hearted way. Possibly because she and Cesare had gotten the most enjoyment out of the game.

‘Well…’ Cesare mused, thinking back to the bottle spinning. He sensed Lucrezia watching him from the corners of her eye, and he had little doubt that Alfonso was listening too. If he replied what Sancía was trying to get him to reply, things might get uncomfortable for him. He was pondering how much he cared if it did.

In the end, he preferred not to offend his sister within the same hour that he’d apologized to her, and he said: ‘Risk. Or maybe Twister. You know what they say, if you’ve got the flexibility…’ He thought that was edgy enough, and Sancía squeezed his leg to show that it was.

‘Well, maybe we can play Twister next time,’ she said. Sancía did not know the extent of Lucrezia’s ire about the events of the previous week, since Lucrezia had pointed most of her darts at Cesare, but Sancía was aware of some discontentment at the very least. Still she leaned forward to look at Lucrezia and involve her in the conversation. She had a slight inclination towards sadism, and she didn’t hide it well.

‘That would be fun, wouldn’t it, Lu? Twister, just the three of us,’ she cooed. This wasn’t rude towards Alfonso, who was being excluded; or at least the principal goal of Sancía’s words was not to spite her brother. She had a penchant for sadism perhaps, but this was meant to come exclusively at the expense of others – as sadism does, obviously. Inviting her brother to a night of “Twister” would likely be very uncomfortable for her, if the night of “Spin the Bottle” was any indication.

‘Yes, sis, wouldn’t that be fun?’ Cesare echoed Sancía’s words. He meant it as a joke and grinned at Lucrezia, but she didn’t appreciate it.

‘I don’t think you will need me for that game of Twister, _brother_ ,’ she said nastily.

His expression dulled and he turned back to Sancía, who was just whipping back her ponytail again. He said something about it to her, something that involved him touching her hair.

Lucrezia watched it with obvious disgust, though no one noticed because Cesare and Sancía weren’t looking at her and Alfonso wasn’t in a position to look at her. She finally averted her eyes and tried to follow the game. She was surprised to find that it had come to a stop, since it couldn’t possibly be halftime yet. She watched the referee speaking to a couple of players, and realized what it must be.

‘Oh look, a time-out! _Great_ ,’ she exclaimed, emphasizing her words with care. She glared at Cesare momentarily, but he didn’t turn to look at her.

‘It’s rude,’ she fumed, and turned to her fiancé at last. She made a gesture to her right.

Alfonso appeared unsettled. ‘Lu,’ he said. He sounded taken aback, and not in a good way.

Lucrezia started apologizing to him, assuming that he was shocked by her outburst, but she soon transitioned back into critiquing the behaviour of Sancía and Cesare.

‘Lu…’ Alfonso tried again. She missed the urgency in his voice.

‘No, I know,’ she said. ‘But I’m just saying that it’s not appropriate at all, and-’

‘Lucrezia!’

She frowned at him, but he was looking at something ahead of them, something in the air. Her lips started forming the word “what”, but then she turned her head and it caught in her throat. The mirror of her own face stared back at her from one of the large screens that had depicted the football game. For a moment she couldn’t fathom why they should want to zoom in on her, but then Sancía pointed out to Cesare that he ought to look up and she understood.

‘Oh, no,’ Lucrezia said to no one in particular, and she started shaking her head and waving her hands around in the air. Cesare was transfixed at first by the huge, ugly heart that captured the both of them on screen, and then he glanced around him laughing sheepishly as the crowds roared and the game’s commentators cracked jokes. The kiss cam riled the blood of people in ways that young, muscled men carrying balls around couldn’t.

Just when it seemed that nothing was going to happen – oh, but boredom is a thing the crowds simply will not stand for: it’s not as if the Romans used to feed the lions before unleashing them on their gladiators – Alfonso reached out and put his hand on Lucrezia’s wrist. He figured that when plan A couldn’t go through, Cesare and Lucrezia being siblings and all that, then plan B was warranted.

Lucrezia turned to look at her hand as if she’d forgotten that Alfonso was sitting on her left. Cesare noticed the movement from the corner of his eye, and he promptly, quite thoughtlessly in fact, put his hand around Lucrezia’s upper arm.

Now, what _happened_ might have been avoided if Cesare had not taken note of Alfonso’s hand. It might also have been avoided had Alfonso not provoked Cesare earlier, or if Cesare had not provoked Lucrezia. But this is speculation – the only thing that one could say with some conviction, is that what _happened_ could not be avoided any more when Lucrezia turned her head towards her brother instead of her fiancé. To ask him what to do, perhaps, since they were in that embarrassing situation together; or to tell him to let go of her. In any event, it sealed her fate, and his.

Cesare leaned into Lucrezia as soon as her head turned and touched his lips down on hers. His right hand went to the side of her neck to remove any chance of it being accidental or, God forbid, innocent, and then Lucrezia put her hand on top of his to remove any chance of it being one-sided.

The arena watched in fascination, for they had seen the initial refusal, the hesitation and maybe also the movement of Alfonso’s – poor Alfonso’s! – hand. It witnessed how Cesare wove his fingers in Lucrezia’s glorious golden hair, the most glorious hair out of anyone in the stadium, surely; it roared wildly when he opened his mouth and slid his tongue between her lips, which she accepted eagerly; and it went entirely mad when Alfonso jumped off his seat looking like he’d been stung by a thousand bees. Sancía, on the other end, sat on the edge of her seat like most other people in the stadium, decidedly more fascinated than abhorred.

No one was sure how long it took, but Lucrezia broke it off before the kiss cam moved away. She jumped up like she had during the spin the bottle game, and stared down at her brother.

Cesare avoided her eyes at first and held his knuckles against his lips as if he were thinking. Then he lowered his hand, looked up at Lucrezia and laughed like they’d just fooled the entire stadium, which in a way they had. He payed little attention to poor Alfonso, who stood looking at Cesare with a terrible look of hatred on his face.

If Lucrezia hadn’t been there, he might have tried to throw Cesare out of the box. But he was by far the kindest of the four of them, and so when Lucrezia said that she’d had enough of the game, he put his arms around her shoulders as if she were sick and escorted her down the stairs. He told himself that he’d beat Cesare to a pulp later, but that’s the sort of thing people think and never do, especially when going down stairs. The French call it l’esprit d’escalier, or staircase wit, and it was a reliable philosopher who coined the term so we can be fairly sure that Cesare was in no danger from Alfonso d’Aragona.

As for the blonde dead cat going down the stairs alongside her docile fiancé – now that is something the French philosopher surely wouldn’t make any promises about: because between her emergence from the box and the first step onto the muddy grass of the stadium, Lucrezia didn’t have a single thought that was inspired by hatred of her brother. Nostalgia, more like.


End file.
